Laura
Mooneyham White (email: lwhite4@unlnotes.unl.edu)
is Associate Professor of English and Director of Nineteenth-Century Studies at
the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the author of Romance, Language, and
Education in Jane Austen’s Novels and numerous essays on Austen as well as
the editor of Critical Essays on Jane Austen.

One of
the most extraordinary technological developments of contemporary life is the
Global Positioning System [GPS], a worldwide radio-navigation system formed
from a constellation of twenty-four satellites and their ground stations.GPS uses these “man-made stars” as
reference points to calculate positions accurate to a matter of meters.In fact, with advanced forms of GPS, one can
make measurements that are accurate to the scale of a single centimeter.In a sense, this technology gives every
square meter on the planet a unique address and allows us to know exactly where
we are at any given moment, whether in a taxi navigating towards the Biltmore,
in a tank in the Iraqi desert, or at the Pump Room in Bath.I would like to use GPS as a metaphor for
Austen’s depiction of social and physical space in Persuasion, where both
social and physical space is also calibrated and denoted to a precise and
minute scale.In particular, the spaces
of Persuasion offer a view of a consciousness—Anne Elliot’s—brought to spatial
hypersensitivity, acutely in touch with her placement in relation to others,
both literally and metaphorically.Further, I ask how the precisions of the geographical imagination Austen
evidences in Persuasion are inflected
by Anne’s embeddedness in human relations—in this novel, what sort of geography do we find?

What sort of geographer was Jane Austen, or, more
precisely, what sort of geographer had she come to be by the time she wrote Persuasion?Certainly, Austen reveals an interest in being careful about geographical
concerns:inches make a difference in
this novel, as Louisa’s fall makes plain, as do miles, such as the
(specifically) fifty miles separating the spacious interiors of Kellynch and
the thirty-foot-wide rented rooms in Camden Place.Her Newtonian certainties
about time and space and her affinity for reading both moral and social
realities as hierarchical were adjusted, increasingly, throughout her career by
her awareness that the human element introduces something relative into
geographical matrixes, and that individual subjectivities operate in some sense
to create Einsteinian curves in the space-time continuum.One’s character and worldview helps set
one’s understanding of both place and time, a logic Anne Elliot follows relative
to place when she notes, after her removal to Uppercross at the start of Persuasion,
that “she believed she must now submit to feel that another lesson, in the art
of knowing our own nothingness beyond our own circle, was become necessary for
her” (42), or later, relative to time, that Captain Benwick’s grief has a decent
chance of coming to an end:“‘He is
younger than I am; younger in feeling, if not in fact; younger as a man’” (97).Anne’s awareness—and Austen’s—that time and
space are to some degree relative, inflected by human values, both individual
and collective, leads us to cultural geography.

Cultural geography, sometimes termed human or social
geography, is the discipline that works to understand the places of the earth
in relation to the human beings who find meaning in them and who are in turn
partly defined by them.Recent
disciplinary movements in cultural geography have brought the academy such sub-disciplinary
emphases as Marxist geography and feminist geography, and we should not be too
surprised to note that “postmodern geography” now bestrides the field as well.Postmodern geography posits the social
construction of spatial relations, and provides a useful lens through which to
view the geography of Persuasion.Though in Persuasion there are
certain obdurate, unmoving physical facts, like the stone Bishop Berkeley
kicked (for instance, the pavement on the Cobb won’t make way for Louisa’s
imperative desire to have just one more thrilling jump), Persuasion
marks itself throughout as a text concerned with the way in which geographical
realities—placement, movement, longitude, latitude—are shifted and constructed
by human consciousness.Throughout,
Anne may know with the precision GPS provides exactly where she and Wentworth are in respect to each other, but she has
much more difficulty determining how
she and Wentworth are in respect to each other.

Alistair Duckworth in his Improvement of the Estate
has famously and impressively demonstrated that Persuasion reveals
Austen’s turning against the idea of the estate as a marker for traditional
values and her openness to other institutions, such as the navy, as conveyors
of what is good and worth conserving:“here the estate is not endangered but abandoned” (184).Claudia Johnson, following Duckworth, has
argued that

The interests of happiness, piety, and well-being
demand removal from Kellynch Hall, its proprieties and priorities.But whether moving beyond Kellynch or any
equivalent bespeaks a victory of autonomy from what a great house represents,
or a despair of its ever improving enough to be desirable, is hard to
say. . . . Good characters depart from [stately houses] without
a breach, differ from them without defiance.(165)

What
follows is my attempt to extend the arguments of both Duckworth and Johnson, to
argue that in this her final novel, Austen turns against the idea of any
kind of place as a stable marker for human value.What becomes most important to Austen in Persuasion is the human element of space, especially what is
authentic and valuable between two lovers, wherever they might be.Ultimately, I will suggest that Anne and
Wentworth effect something of an escape from geography.

It’s appropriate to view Persuasion through the
geographic lens because Anne Elliot is herself marked as a capable geographer of physical
and social space from early in the novel.She knows that social space, unlike physical space, is relative, and
knows the exact degree of difference between the status of Kellynch to its
inhabitants discussing its value within the confines of its drawing room on the
one hand and its status to those three miles away (the distance is marked
exactly) at Uppercross.Her
geographic skills are different from those of Fanny Price, whose geographic
interests are brought to our attention, first in terms of her deficits (her
cousins sneer because Fanny as a child thinks every island is the Isle of
Wight, the only island she knows) and then later in terms of her role as
arm-chair imaginist, reading in the East room about Lord Macartney’s travels to
China.Unlike Fanny, Anne is a skilled
geographer because she has had to be to follow the career of Captain
Wentworth; she knows where the Asp and the Laconia have sailed, and where
Admiral Croft has been stationed, and the byways of the Atlantic and the
Mediterranean, because she has been reading the navy lists and newspapers like
the Naval Gazette.1

Anne’s skill as a geographer, then, has one
purpose:to track the man she
loves.Beyond that, her consciousness
and valuation of place shifts, from a nostalgic desire to keep Kellynch as an
ideal to a more forward-looking movement towards Wentworth himself.At the novel’s start, she does invest place
with meaning, especially the favored “lawns and groves” of Kellynch (14).But her attitude towards place is neither
aristocratic nor inflexible.In this
regard, she is opposed by her family, all of whom are attached to the
conservative idea that “place”—estate as well as rank—connotes value directly
and irrespective of the human qualities on display.Everywhere, the Elliots and their ally Lady Russell employ the
language of “degradation,” “descent,” and “disgrace” to illustrate what is at
issue in Sir Walter’s leaving Kellynch or in other matters that threaten their
own social prominence.For example,
Lady Russell avers that “[i]t would be too much to expect Sir Walter to descend into a small house in his own
neighbourhood” (14, emphasis mine).Mary too, full of the Elliot pride, has an unvarying regard for “place”
in its double sense of estate and social rank. The Miss Musgroves complain to
Anne “‘how nonsensical some persons are about their place, because, all the
world knows how easy and indifferent you are about it:but I wish any body could give Mary a hint
that it would be a great deal better if she were not so very tenacious;
especially, if she would not be always putting herself forward to take place of
mamma’” (46).It is left to Mrs. Croft
to speak the language that undermines such nonsensical commitments to “place”
as a sign of rank, as when she compares the elegance of Kellynch Hall unfavorably
to a man-of-war:“‘I declare I have not
a comfort or an indulgence about me, even at Kellynch-hall . . .
beyond what I always had in most of the ships I have lived in; and they have
been five altogether’” (69).Like Mrs.
Croft, Anne opposes aristocratic values that confuse rank with intrinsic
dignity; even the opening pages of the novel tell us that Anne desires “honesty
against importance” (12), and later she asserts that she is “‘too proud to
enjoy a welcome which depends . . . entirely upon place’” (151).Opposed to the Elliots are the
manipulators—Mrs. Clay and Mr. Elliot—for whom place works as one among a
number of variables to be used to their advantage.Mr. Elliot’s changing valuation of Kellynch-hall follows only
from ambition, though he can speak the language of privilege well enough (“‘rank
is rank,’” he tells Anne [150]), while Mrs. Clay is entirely knowledgeable
about the contextual art of flattery:“she was a clever young woman, who understood the art of pleasing; the
art of pleasing, at least, at Kellynch-hall” (15).

In the center, between the extremes of the Elliots,
hide-bound reverers of rank and place, and the Machiavells, Mr. Elliot and Mrs.
Clay, stands Anne.Her assessment of
the value of an estate or of any one place at all shifts in the novel, so that
though by the novel’s end she will be tempted briefly by the idea of conjoining
in herself the name “Lady Elliot” with a reinvigoration of Kellynch, she will
also reject the idea:“For a few
moments her imagination and her heart were bewitched.The idea of becoming what her mother had been; of having the
precious name of ‘Lady Elliot’ first revived in herself; of being restored to
Kellynch, calling it her home again, her home for ever, was a charm which she
could not immediately resist” (160).“Bewitched” is the key term here, and Anne shakes off this atavistic
vision as an immoral one, depending as it does on marrying a man of whom she
disapproves: “The same image of Mr. Elliot speaking for himself, brought Anne
to composure again.The charm of
Kellynch and of ‘Lady Elliot’ all faded away.She never could accept him” (160).

Anne’s changing ideas about Kellynch are displayed
against a consistent motif in the novel of missed opportunities and
meetings.The novel is replete with
small occasions on which the reader—and Anne—are led to expect that she or
someone else will meet someone or go somewhere or that someone will come to
them; again and again, these expectations are unfulfilled.These many missed meetings serve as an
object lesson about impermanence, chance, and luck, and argue implicitly
against holding too tightly onto a value system that connects one’s “place,”
however understood, with one’s happiness.Further, the repeated trope of confounding Anne’s and others’
expectations that a given person will appear in a given place reinforces the
idea that places only take on meaning as they become scenes for human action
and feeling.

We begin this pattern at the famous end of chapter
three, where Austen plays with the reader’s romantic expectations by allowing
Anne a “gentle sigh” as she walks along a “favourite grove”:“‘a few months more, and he, perhaps, may be walking here’” (25).The reader is being set up in two ways.First, we are invited to conjecture prematurely
about who this romantic “he” might be (the start of the next chapter humorously
upbraids us by relating, “He was not
Mr. Wentworth, the former curate of Monkford, however suspicious appearances
may be, but a captain Frederick Wentworth, his brother” [26]).Second, and more important for the present
argument, we are being led to expect that at some happy moment in the plot,
Anne will walk through these favorite groves with this beloved, even if he is
at the moment unknown.Incidentally,
both here and later when Wentworth is installed at Kellynch with the Crofts,
Austen couldn’t be plainer about what Anne is not thinking:how unfair it
is that the man she loved and rejected is now living the high life in the house
from which she has been expelled through no fault of her own.For instance, since we as readers are
unlikely to be as purely good as Anne, we might well notice the point when the
narrator tells us that “Captain Wentworth was come to Kellynch as to a home, to
stay as long as he liked” (73).However,
the very issue—envy—that would gnaw at either of her repellent sisters or
lesser mortals such as us never intrudes into Anne’s consciousness at all.She is not even disturbed when Mary wonders whether
Wentworth might someday be made a baronet, rising to their father’s status with
more than their father’s wealth:“‘That
would be a noble thing, indeed, for Henrietta! She would take place of me then, and Henrietta would not dislike
that.Sir Frederick and Lady Wentworth!’”
(75).In any case, this walk in the
groves of Kellynch never happens, or at least, if Wentworth ever strolls there
while he is staying with the Crofts, Austen never tells us about it, and Anne
and Wentworth certainly never stroll there together.

The pattern of missed meetings continues apace.Anne stays away when the Crofts first tour
Kellynch in the role of prospective tenants (“Anne found it most natural to
take her almost daily walk to Lady Russell’s, and keep out of the way till all
was over” [32]).She almost meets
Captain Wentworth on his first visit to Uppercross, but the fall of her nephew
prevents her usual morning visit to the Great House.That next evening, while Mary and Charles abdicate their parental
responsibilities and leave her to tend to their wounded son, Anne is left to
ponder, “what was it to her, if Frederick Wentworth were only half a mile
distant, making himself agreeable to others!” (58).Wentworth himself is the agent of the next missed encounter, as
he arranges things so that the breakfast occurs at the Great House rather than
at the Cottage.A few days later, by
pleading a headache, Anne also misses the dinner at which Henrietta and Louisa
vie for Wentworth’s attentions.

Nor does Anne see Wentworth while she is at Lady Russell’s,
though she expects to:being there “would
place her in the same village with Captain Wentworth, within half a mile of
him; they would have to frequent the same church, and there must be intercourse
between the two families” (93).This
half-mile Anne notes, incidentally, seems to guarantee contact, while a
different half-mile, that between Charles’s cottage and the Great House, had
been, we remember, at one point an insuperable barrier.The seemingly guaranteed contact, however,
comes to nothing, because the intervening visit to Lyme and the accident there
disrupt everything:Wentworth goes to
visit his brother to create distance, both emotional and physical, between
himself and Louisa.Thus Anne’s anxiety
about their renewed proximity comes to nothing.As the narrator notes, “So ended all danger to Anne of meeting
Captain Wentworth at Kellynch-hall, or of seeing him in company with her
friend.Every thing was safe enough,
and she smiled over the many anxious feelings she had wasted on the subject”
(128).

If she isn’t to expect Captain Wentworth, she is to
expect Captain Benwick.Charles
Musgrove gives Anne every reason to expect a visit from this newly-ardent
admirer.However, as Elizabeth Elliot
found with Mr. Elliot many years earlier at Kellynch, the ardency of a suitor
becomes suspect when he never shows up.Benwick is expected and expected, but never comes:

There can be no doubt that Lady Russell and Anne were
both occasionally thinking of Captain Benwick, from this time.Lady Russell could not hear the door-bell
without feeling that it might be his herald; nor could Anne return from any
stroll of solitary indulgence in her father’s grounds, or any visit of charity
in the village, without wondering whether she might see him or hear of him.Captain Benwick came not, however. (133)

Only
many chapters later will the reader learn that his non-appearance followed from
his fickle new attachment to the convalescent Louisa, and further learn that
the doctrine of “location, location, location” holds in matters of romance as
well as real estate valuations.Anne
realizes that Benwick fell in love with Louisa because she was there.Anne queries herself, “Where could have been the attraction?The answer soon presented itself.It had been in situation” (166-67).Any young eligible woman in Benwick’s
immediate orbit was thus marked to become the woman he would choose to marry.As Anne notes, “any tolerably pleasing young
woman who had listened and seemed to feel for him, would have received the same
compliment. He had an affectionate
heart.He must love somebody” (167).After all, when Anne had been the young
woman closest to hand, Benwick had wooed her.

The vagaries of human connections are also reinforced
by meetings which are unexpected.Such
chance meetings include Mr. Elliot’s visit to the very inn at which Anne’s
party is staying at Lyme, or Wentworth’s entrance into the same tea shop that
holds Anne, her sister, and Mrs. Clay at Bath.We know that both men would have been glad of the benefits of GPS to
track Anne down, but Austen’s role as providential author is sufficient to
bring both Mr. Elliott and Captain Wentworth within meters of the woman they
desire.Authorial providence seems to
play a role as well when Wentworth catches Anne alone as she tends her injured
nephew, or when the ladies’ walk to Winthrop happens to converge with the walk
of the returning sportsmen, Wentworth and Charles Musgrove.In her role as one who guarantees
providential meetings, Austen has been kind enough to provide a too-young dog
to the hunters, who prematurely spoils their chances of killing the birds they
had in view.

In one telling moment, Austen goes so far as to invoke
Providence (capitalized) as the cause of such near-misses or unexpected
meetings.When Mary makes a great fuss
about missing an opportunity to be introduced to Mr. Elliot at the inn in Lyme,
she laments the mourning requirements which made it impossible for her to
discern the Elliot livery as well as the greatcoat that happened to obscure the
Elliot arms displayed on the coach’s door.Wentworth’s commentary is ironic:“‘Putting all these very extraordinary circumstances together, . . .
we must consider it to be the arrangement of Providence, that you should not be
introduced to your cousin’” (106).His
speech reminds us of Austen’s own role as the creator of providential
circumstances, arranging the plot as she does to amplify the uncertainties of
human contact.Further, however, Austen
has played a providential role in this particular instance of plot, for had the
introduction Mary seeks taken place, the incident which follows Mary’s
complaint, Louisa’s fall, might not have taken place, and Louisa’s fall is key
to the ultimate reunification of Anne and Wentworth.

Austen encourages the reader to participate in the
expectations and disappointments felt by her characters relative to these
missed meetings.For example, the
first-time reader of the novel is expecting Benwick at Kellynch Lodge as much
as is Anne or Lady Russell.This
employment of red herrings is particularly notable toward the end of the novel,
when we are led to believe that something of real significance will follow
Anne’s meeting with Lady Russell, in which she expects to inform Lady Russell
about the true badness of Mr. Elliot’s character. We are informed of multiple delays that hinder this meeting, each
time in a way that implies this communication is vital to the narrative’s
progress.The most striking passage
telling of such a delay employs a metaphor from a famous meta-narrative, The Arabian Night’s Entertainment:Anne “had promised to be with the Musgroves
from breakfast to dinner.Her faith was
plighted, and Mr. Elliot’s character, like the Sultaness Scheherazade’s head,
must live another day” (229).Only by
telling the Sultan another tale each night did the Sultaness preserve her life;
Mr. Elliot’s reputation with Lady Russell is preserved by Anne’s not telling a tale.More important, it never ultimately
matters.Lady Russell only learns about
Mr. Elliot’s rottenness after Anne and Wentworth are engaged and after Mr.
Elliot has run off with Mrs. Clay.Thus, the putatively vital meeting between Anne and Lady Russell serves
no function in the plot and is never rendered in a scene.Similarly, the plot of the last few chapters
extends another red herring, for all of Anne’s hopes for reconciliation with
Captain Wentworth seem to hinge upon whether or not Captain Wentworth will
attend Elizabeth’s evening party.But a
chance meeting in the street between Anne and Wentworth brings them entirely in
loving accord with each other much earlier that day, and the evening party
becomes nothing more than a scene for afterthoughts.By drawing the reader into a web of expectations concerning these
and other events which never actually occur, Austen reinforces her point that
chance plays such a large role in human affairs that happiness must be seized
whenever and wherever it becomes available.

One last missed meeting comes so late in the novel
that Austen can play it for full comic effect, secure in the knowledge that the
pattern has been strongly established thus far.Walking with Lady Russell, Anne has caught sight of Wentworth on
the streets of Bath, after a full hour of an “incessant and fearful sort of
watch for him in vain” (178).Her consciousness
marks him with intensity and precision:“She distinguished him on the right hand pavement at such a distance as
to have him in view the greater part of the street.There were many other men about him, many groups walking the same
way, but there was no mistaking him” (179).With great anxiety and anticipation, she awaits the moment when Lady
Russell will also see Wentworth, and, at the last moment, is sure that Lady
Russell’s intent gaze has fallen on the man she loves.So sure is Anne that she hypothesizes the
train of thoughts and feelings Lady Russell is experiencing:

She could thoroughly comprehend the sort of
fascination he must possess over Lady Russell’s mind, the difficulty it must be
for her to withdraw her eyes, the astonishment she must be feeling that eight
or nine years should have passed over him, and in foreign climes and in active
service too, without robbing him of one personal grace!(179)

The
moment of comic deflation arrives—Lady Russell has been looking for a certain
kind of window-curtain and has not seen Wentworth at all.Moreover, because Anne has been preoccupied
with watching Lady Russell, she has missed seeing whether Wentworth saw her.Austen may be expressing something of this
three-way missed view (we do not learn if Wentworth saw Anne, nor if Lady
Russell saw Wentworth, and Anne misses seeing Wentworth at the crucial moment)
in a rude joke, as the curtains Lady Russell sought were putatively the “‘handsomest
and best hung of any in Bath’” (179); the curtains’ qualities, if seen in
Wentworth, would confirm his physical attractions at a level of view much lower
(in both senses) than Lady Russell’s upraised gaze.2At any rate, Lady Russell has missed both
the curtains and the man.

The force of all these hypothetical meetings and
missed chances is amplified by other hypothetical musings in the novel.Given the novel’s abiding interest in
regret, we should not be surprised that Anne’s speech is often described
hypothetically, in terms of what might have been said but has not been and
cannot be said.3For
example, Anne’s sober assessment of her early decision against Wentworth is
framed thus:“How eloquent could Anne
Elliot have been,—how eloquent, at least, were her wishes on the side of early
warm attachment, and a cheerful confidence in futurity, against that
over-anxious caution which seems to insult exertion and distrust Providence!”
(30).Similarly, we note her somber
reflection on meeting Captain Benwick and Captain Harville and his family:“‘These would have been all my friends’” (98).We even have the narrator recording for Anne
on the occasion of her first visit to Kellynch after the Crofts’ possession a
curious hypothetical negative apostrophe to Kellynch:“In such moments Anne had no power of saying to herself, ‘These
rooms ought to belong only to us.Oh,
how fallen in their destination!How
unworthily occupied!An ancient family to
be so driven away!Strangers filling
their place!’” (126).These lines are
remarkable for their rhetorical complexity; not only do they imply a snobbery that Anne has never felt, they
give voice to a speech Anne could only give were her family worthy of her
station.The speeches which are imagined
but never voiced work in parallel throughout the novel with the meetings that
never occur to make genuine human connection all the more valuable.

The most important missed meeting occurs, of course,
when Louisa jumps precipitately off the Cobb and misses Wentworth’s hands,
waiting to catch her.By the end of the
novel, we know that this accident was indeed providential, because it provides
a deus ex machina by which Wentworth
and Anne can come together again.Interestingly, Louisa’s leap down works to sink her appeal to Wentworth,
while a few pages earlier, his interest in Anne is rekindled when she ascends
some steps at the beach under the obviously admiring gaze of Mr. Elliot.Austen is not too sophisticated an author to
be above having Anne go up, literally and figuratively, as Louisa goes down.

All these missed meetings are further underscored by a
related pattern in the novel, the multiple prior sad histories of various
characters, histories marked by grief or loss.The stillborn son who would have been Anne’s younger brother and who
would have kept the estate within her own immediate family, Lady Elliot’s
death, Elizabeth’s early disappointment in Mr. Elliot, Mrs. Clay’s widowhood,
the death of “poor” Dick Musgrove, Charles Musgrove’s failed proposal of
marriage to Anne, the death of Fanny Harville, Mrs. Smith’s widowhood and
financial ruin—all create a threnody of disappointment behind the novel’s most
important and foundational sad history, that of Anne’s early loss of
Wentworth.All these losses have taken
place before the novel even begins, a point that reinforces the moral that
human connections are difficult to maintain in the face of illness, greed,
vanity, death, and war.We are led to
understand that Wentworth’s playful apostrophe to the nut, that symbol of
constancy, should perhaps have spoken more of the providential arrangement that
had secured it from the blasts of autumn.That is, the nut should not get as much credit for staying uninjured as
he gives it.We are further led to understand
that Anne’s eventual recompense, her reversal of loss, is both precious and
extraordinary.

If happiness is indeed so tenuously gained, how does
one place oneself to bring happiness into being?After all, once Wentworth returns to England, Anne no longer
needs newspapers or maps to learn where he is from a geographical point of
view, but she is still handicapped by propriety and circumstance from making
much of their relative physical proximity.After all, what good is GPS if
the person you seek is exactly next to you, but distant?The novel emphasizes, through Anne’s consciousness,
the intensity of the hero’s and heroine’s mutual physical relation more than in
any other of Austen’s novels, exactly in order to make clear how far apart they
really are.Particularly before the
scenes in Bath, the emphasis is on closeness without closeness, on the
disjunction between physical propinquity and emotional alienation.The pattern begins when Anne and Wentworth
first meet in the parlor at Uppercross Cottage, where Anne’s distress is so
extreme that she can barely attend to the buzz of “persons and voices” (59).Anne’s thoughts just after this encounter
run in circles—“She had seen him.They
had met.They had been once more in the
same room!” (60)—but the repetition of statements which insist on their
physical nearness only emphasizes their apartness in every other respect.In this encounter, we are told, Wentworth
has said “all that was right” (59), but this phrase can only denote civil
nothingnesses.He will not say “all
that is right” for many pages to come.As their moments of physical contiguity continue, so that they are “repeatedly
in the same circle,” Anne laments what seems to be a “perpetual
estrangement”:“Once so much to each
other!Now nothing! . . . Now
they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become
acquainted” (63-64).

The distance between Anne and Wentworth in these
scenes is charged, as when Mrs. Musgrove sits between them on a sofa, and room
must be made for her “large fat sighings” (68).Anne’s thoughts make plain how unnerving she finds this
particular spatial configuration:“They
were actually on the same sofa, for Mrs. Musgrove had most readily made room
for him;—they were divided only by Mrs. Musgrove.It was no insignificant barrier indeed” (68).Prior to the chapters at Lyme, Wentworth and
Anne even touch physically twice, or, rather, Wentworth touches Anne, but these
occasions only magnify the other distances between them.When he hauls the burly toddler off Anne’s
back without saying a word, or when he again wordlessly hands her into the
Crofts’ carriage after the long walk to Winthrop, the chasm between the touch
and the intangible barriers between them is wide and deep.Even after the accident at Lyme, when he is
sitting right between Anne and Henrietta on the return carriage journey to
Uppercross, he keeps his distance, turning always towards Henrietta rather than
towards Anne and appealing to Anne only in the last moments of their trip, a
softening of his previous aloofness which she cherishes.

The language of precise placement intensifies in the
final Bath sections, where Anne becomes in charge of her own movements,
maneuvering into particular vantage points within various public spaces, such
as her strategic choice of the end bench at the concert, and insisting on her
right to choose her own travels about town, as when she claims and acts upon
her prerogative to visit Mrs. Smith in the relatively humble
“Westgate-buildings.”Up to this point
in the novel, Anne has been the one character without freedom of movement or
choice about where she will go.Austen
has focused repeatedly in the narrative on the perversity of the restrictions
placed upon Anne, starting with her father’s decision to move to Bath: “There
had been three alternatives, London, Bath, or another house in the
country.All Anne’s wishes had been for
the latter. . . . But the usual fate of Anne attended her. . . .
She disliked Bath, and did not think it agreed with her—and Bath was to be her
home” (13-14).Later, she is commanded
to go to Uppercross by her sister, and the matter is settled by Elizabeth’s proclamation
that no one will want Anne in Bath.Later still, Lady Russell’s social calendar determines when Anne will
ultimately go to Bath. As for the trip
to Lyme, the others may be “wild” to go, but Anne’s role in the trip is decided
for her rather than left to her inclination.The situation is the same when it becomes a question of who will return
to Uppercross versus who will stay to nurse Louisa; Anne’s inclination is again
overruled, this time by Mary’s selfishness.

Anne has little or no agency, then, about her own
movements until she comes to Bath.Only
in Bath do we meet a character with less freedom of movement than Anne:Mrs. Smith, whose “accommodations were
limited to a noisy parlour, and a dark bed-room behind, with no possibility of
moving from one to the other without assistance” (154).The focus in Bath, however, as many critics
have noted, is on Anne’s ability to move, decide, and act for herself.There, at the evening concert, Anne is
emboldened to “mak[e] yet a little advance” and to speak to Wentworth
“instantly” (181).Though they are
divided later that night by his jealousy of Mr. Elliot, Anne still works to
catch his eye.And while Wentworth
retreats, believing himself beaten by his rival, we are not at this point in
the novel encouraged to believe that the retreat will be permanent.In other words, the red herring of
Wentworth’s jealousy of Mr. Elliot does not carry much force here.We not only have the “tell-tale compression
of the pages” to show that we are “hastening together to perfect felicity,” as
the antepenultimate page of Northanger
Abbey declares (250), but we also have Anne herself, steadying her own and
the reader’s fears:“‘Surely, if there
be constant attachment on each side, our hearts must understand each other ere
long.We are not boy and girl, to be
captiously irritable, misled by every moment’s inadvertence, and wantonly playing
with our own happiness’” (221).

The climax of the novel offers a particularly charged
sense of intimate distance and a particularly subtle set of maneuvers, all
designed so that Anne and Wentworth can return to right relation with each
other.Anne’s confession of her
continuing love for Wentworth, veiled as it is in generalities spoken to
Captain Harville, works only if Wentworth is close enough to hear it, and
Austen is at pains to keep us in suspense about whether or not he is hearing it:how close, exactly, is close enough?At the sound of his dropped pen, Anne turns, “startled at finding
him nearer than she had supposed, and half inclined to suspect that the pen had
only fallen, because he had been occupied by them, striving to catch sounds,
which yet she did not think he could have caught” (233-34).Anne learns from his note, scrawled under
the influence of her words, that he has heard her, indeed:“‘You sink your voice, but I can distinguish
the tones of that voice, when they would be lost on others’” (237).The letter prepares for their happenstance
meeting in Union-street, when they can explain to each other the private ardor
the narrator refrains from giving us in direct speech.All the reader need know is that here “the
power of conversation would make the present hour a blessing indeed; and
prepare for it all the immortality which the happiest recollections of their
own future lives could bestow” (240).

Here, at the moment of romantic resolution, Austen
underscores that the place, the backdrop for this scene, falls far short of the
romantic venue in the Kellynch groves Anne had gently sighed for at the start
of the novel.Instead, Anne and
Wentworth must make do, first with a “gravel-walk” in the center of Bath,
crowded with “sauntering politicians, bustling house-keepers, flirting girls,
[and] nursery-maids and children” (240-41), and, second, with a few stolen
moments in the Camden-house drawing rooms, only a few feet from a throng of
relations and friends, as they share their intimacies next to a “fine display
of green-house plants” (246).These green-house
plants are there, I warrant, to remind us that this locale is expressly not the
idyll Anne had formerly imagined, but, further, that where the lovers are at this point simply does not matter.

It has often been remarked, but bears repeating, that
given Austen’s previous consuming interest in settling her heroines into particular
spaces—estates—loaded with specific marks of cultural and moral value, it is
revolutionary for her to leave to the reader’s imagination the final placement
of Anne and Wentworth. In fact, they
are not really finally “placed” at all, though we do learn that they have a
“settled Life” (with “Life” capitalized in the original manuscript ending of
the novel [251, 273]).But this
“settled Life” is threatened by the prospect of another war, and the one detail
we learn about Anne’s married life, her “pretty landaulette” (250), indicates
that she and Wentworth will emulate the Crofts’ touring spirit.What matters is that they are together, and
presumably will be even if England goes to war again, if (as seems likely) Anne
emulates what has been presented to us as Mrs. Croft’s good example.If Austen has operated as a cultural
geographer throughout the novel, seeking to make sense of people in relation to
the places they occupy, by the novel’s end she has allowed her two protagonists
the latitude to escape longitude, as it were.Anne and Wentworth are not described as being at any given point of the
compass, nor are they at any particular address or estate, and surely they do
not reside in any of the multiple Bath streets named in the novel, Pulteney or
Union Street, Camden or Laura Place.They are not available to the reader’s positioning systems; our readerly
radars are useless.For Austen and for
her protagonists, this escape from our spatial reckoning must be imagined as a
victory.

Notes

1.The names of Wentworth’s two ships are
revealing.The Asp, his first ship,
invokes the mode of suicide Cleopatra employs after Antony fails her. Wentworth, partly in jest, speaks of the Asp
as a death-trap:“‘The admiralty . . .
entertain themselves now and then, with sending a few hundred men to sea, in a
ship not fit to be employed.But they
have a great many to provide for; and among the thousands that may just as well
go to the bottom as not, it is impossible for them to distinguish the very set
who may be least missed’” (65).The
Laconia, his second ship, was the Attic name for Sparta, and gives us our
adjective “laconic.”It is an
appropriate name for a ship on which the hero finds his worth through action
alone.

On another note, Michael Page at the University of
Nebraska has recently found in the university library, camouflaged under a 1950s
binding, a scrapbook of the Naval Gazette, the paper of record for naval
affairs in Austen’s day, and other newspaper clippings related to the navy’s
monumental struggle against the French army of Napoleon.The compiler of this collection, one R.
Chapman, lived five doors down from the Naval Gazette’s publisher (93
and 98 Cheapside, respectively, in London); he starts his collection at the
first report of the Battle of Trafalgar and Lord Nelson’s death (the battle
took place in October 1805 but news of the engagement didn’t reach British
shores until November), and finishes it with an account of the disastrous
retreat of the Grand Armée from Russia in 1812, just two years before the
narrative of Persuasion begins, just after the Treaty of Paris in
1814.One of the lovely things about
this homemade collection is that Chapman was plainly a man in-the-know during
this period; his marginalia correct casualty reports and other matters of
fact.Mr. Chapman seems to have been as
attentive a reader of naval affairs as Anne Elliot, and one can imagine Anne
keeping a similar scrapbook of naval postings and news during the long years
between 1806 and 1814, a period that overlaps the period of this collection.

2.Jillian Heydt-Stevenson has memorably
suggested that this metonymy (well-hung curtains standing in for a well-hung
man) is part of a much larger system of subversive and bawdy humor Austen
incorporates in her novels.Her reading
of this particular moment in Persuasion
argues that Lady Russell’s reference to the curtains covers (“curtains”) the
fact that she had in fact seen Wentworth, and thus she unconsciously transforms
his disturbing presence into the safer and concealing curtains (193-96).Lady Russell’s desire to make this
replacement Heydt-Stevenson sees as following from her aversion to his modest
origins (194).I am convinced, however,
that the metonymy takes place only on the level of the narrative, not at the
level of Lady Russell’s consciousness—were Lady Russell to have seen Wentworth,
she would not unconsciously replace him in a language of avoidance and
displacement with such complimentary terms.The general reading of the curtains as metonymic of Wentworth’s body,
however, is reinforced by the fact that Lady Russell has been looking for
curtains described to her by two friends, Lady Alicia and Mrs. Frankland
(characters whom we never meet).“Alicia” can be etymologically understood as suggesting the “a-licit,”
the illicit, while Mrs. Frankland’s name implies that this passage operates
within the territory of the frank, the sexually candid.

3.See Seiferman for multiple examples in the
text of Persuasion of this phenomenon
(290).